In 1847 Atwill of New York published “The Lament of the Blind Orphan Girl.” Composed by William Bradbury, the song is written for voice and piano in a lilting 3/8 meter. Mary, the song’s protagonist, sings of “the silvery moon” and “bright chain of stars” over diatonic harmonies. A dramatic shift to the minor mode supports the climax: “Oh, when shall I see them? I’m blind, oh, I’m blind.” Mary explains that she and her brother have also lost their parents. On the sheet music cover a wreath of flowers encircles an image of a young white woman kneeling beneath a tree, alone at a grave. The title page notes: “As sung with distinguished applause by Abby Hutchinson.” Orphan songs pervade nineteenth-century pop repertory. Scholars have analyzed Latvian, Hmong, Danish, and German orphan songs, but US orphan songs have generated little more than passing references. Other examples include: “The Orphan Nosegay Girl” with words by Mrs. Susanna Rowson from 1805; “The Colored Orphan Boy,” composed by C. D. Abbott and sung by S. C. Campbell of the Campbell Minstrels from 1852; and “The Orphan Ballad Singers Ballad” by Henry Russell from 1866. Orphans were not just a topic; in the latter half of the nineteenth century, actual parentless youth featured in bands such as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Band of New York City. This paper connects the stolen childhoods in orphan songs to those of enslaved youth. If free children were aware of slavery and the movement to abolish it as historian Wilma King has shown, what did it mean for Abby Hutchinson, who started performing abolitionist songs with her brothers at age twelve, to sing as the sentimental stock character of the orphan? Songs like the one above may have been a way that young abolitionists empathized with enslaved youths robbed of their youths.

Seventy-six-year-old Alvenia Bridges is someone who could be described as forever young. While she contends with typical signs of aging such as osteoporosis and arthritis, her daily meditative walks, diet of primarily salmon and avocados, and invigorating friendships contribute to her youthful demeanor. But a healthy lifestyle can only account for so much. Her captivating storytelling is what truly keeps her young. When she recounts her ability to move throughout the world in the heyday of her youth and when she describes how music allowed her to escape a violent beginning and discover her true purpose for existing, she transports both herself and her listener to another place and time. In doing so, age loses all meaning. Furthermore, her experience as a Black woman navigating the predominantly white and male-run world of Rock and Roll bears witness to the racial and gendered dynamics that exist in the music industry, highlighting how the past informs the present. By narrating an incident that occurred when Bridges was tour-managing the Rolling Stones, this lecture explores how our ethnographic memoir entitled Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges conveys the power one wields when telling a story on one’s own terms.

This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine how Annie Clark, who records and performs under the alias St. Vincent, problematized the electric guitar’s gendered address by designing a Signature Collection for Music Man, a subsidiary of equipment manufacturer Ernie Ball. It first contextualizes the industrial efforts to make the electric guitar more accessible to girls during Clark’s adolescence and their limitations. It then analyzes Clark’s promotional strategies for the collection. Most branding opportunities available to female music industry professionals interested in extending their commercial shelf life often affirm conventionally feminine modes of creative self-expression, such as fashion and cosmetics. Clark’s guitar challenges such gender essentialism by highlighting her own virtuosity as a queer musician, songwriter, and producer while giving players a different set of tools with which to create new sounds.

This article explores the role of gender stereotype and gender bias within the industrial ecosystem of live music touring through the archetype of “Merch Girl,” a catch-all for women who sell merchandise. Using twenty interviews with touring workers and supplementary fieldwork, it situates the idea of “Merch Girl” within its industry ecosystem, querying the gendered dynamics of touring and the place of the merch stand in an often-sexist setting. It argues that merch selling’s second-class status is symptomatic of a set of insidious industrywide assumptions that delimit women’s ability to participate equitably in touring, specifically (1) that the job is a backroad for so-called “groupies” and romantic partners to gain illicit access; (2) that the merch table labor is gendered; and (3) that women’s place within live music itself is resultingly precarious. This rhetoric is a symptom of institutional sexism that delegitimizes women’s ability to belong in the touring industry.

Audible in speech and song, electro-pop singer Grimes’s so-called “baby doll” lisp generates endless buzz online, ranging from light-hearted adoration, to infantilization, to sexual fetish and even to ableist, misogynist anti-fandom. This article uses the reception of her lisp to build an intersectional theory of lisping across its medical and socio-cultural constructions, bridging work in disability studies, dysfluency studies, voice studies, and popular music studies in the process. I situate the slippage between adoring, infantilizing, fetishistic, and violent characterizations of Grimes’s lisp as reflective of the infantilization of “communicative disorders” in speech language pathology, and the dysfunction associated with feminine coded-speech patterns (e.g. vocal fry and up talk) in the popular imaginary. Lisping is profitably understood as an audible form of “liminal” difference relative to visible physical disabilities (St. Pierre), and to certain ableist, gendered, and racialized conceptions of normative vocality. Ultimately, in the English-speaking world, the lisp is symbolically-coded feminine while exceeding the norms of female vocality, thereby giving rise to a polarizing set of associations that work against female authority and, by extension in Grimes’s case, female musical authorship. Grimes’s reception thus offers a valuable case study for interrogating how misogynist fantasies regarding femininity are thought localized in the female voice, and the symbolic ties between disability and femininity.